‘How could I leave and share custody with a monster?’ Inside Carol-Anne’s hell

Carol-Anne still flinches at the sight of bright lights.

Curtains remain partially closed in her immaculate home in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, a sign, detectives say, of her escape from one of the most confronting cases of domestic violence they’ve recently prosecuted.

Instead of blood-spattered walls, family photographs adorn the home as the 53-year-old mother of two works to rebuild her life after escaping from the clutches of a monster she says was living in plain sight.

Detective Sergeant Elise Douglas (left) and domestic violence survivor Carol-Anne.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui

Lifting the veil on what it’s like to survive “hell”, Carol-Anne – whose surname has been withheld to protect her children – says she wants to show other women that no matter your socio-economic circumstances, ethnic background or suburb, domestic violence is an insidious horror that can infiltrate any home.

“If I did something wrong, I did not cook something the right way or park the car in the wrong spot, he’d just blow up. Use me as a punching bag,” she sobs.

“I remember begging that if he was going to beat me, not to do it where anyone could see it. To hide it under my clothes, so I didn’t have to constantly put on make-up to hide the bruises.

“How could I leave and share custody with a monster? Where was I going to go, what sort of help was I going to get, who would believe me?”

On the outside, Carol-Anne’s family home seemed idyllic. An educated, hard-working family raising two young children in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. But on the inside, she says it was hell.

In November 2023, her ex-husband, Nick Rizakis, was jailed for five years and two months, with a non-parole period of two years and 10 months, for 10 charges of common law assault, one of making threats to kill and one charge of stalking.

Carol-Anne wants women to know just because you’re married, it doesn’t mean you cannot leave.

“I’m just an average person, my family growing up was beautiful. We did not have anything like this, so when it happened to me, it just completely took me by surprise,” Carol-Anne says.

The pair met in 2007 at a bar, and Carol-Anne recalls immediately being showered with gifts and attention in what she now knows is textbook love bombing.

About a year into their relationship, she says the abuse began, first verbal and coercive control, and then physical beatings, as she was increasingly forced to sleep in her car when locked out of the family home.

Then her bones began to break.

In 2010, following a night at the same bar where they met, Rizakis became enraged. He took issue with the way he believed Carol-Anne was interacting with the bar owner’s friend. On the way home, he drove erratically, punching Carol-Anne in the face until her nose bled. When they arrived home, he threw Carol-Anne against a wall, giving her two black eyes.

Strangulation was reported by nearly nine in 10 women calling Victoria’s 24/7 family-violence crisis response centre, Safe Steps, this year.Credit: Marija Ercegovac

The next day, Rizakis told Carol-Anne she was responsible for the violence and forced her out of the house, refusing to let her back inside until she got on her hands and knees, begged him for forgiveness, and licked the concrete step.

“I didn’t even know what to look for. I was completely confused about it, it just did not register. So when all the events started unfolding, I panicked. I was embarrassed, it’s something you don’t want to tell people is happening behind the scenes,” Carol-Anne says.

“He’d come and wake me up, then the torture began, the grilling with the bright lights on. Continually belittling, degrading. In the end, that’s what I thought I was.”

When she became pregnant in 2011, Rizakis tried to force her to abort the pregnancy, and when she refused, he beat her and ripped hair out of her scalp.

In 2014, Telstra reported a crying female caller who had rung triple zero from the couple’s home but hung up when someone answered. It was Carol-Anne. Police arrived and served a family violence safety notice on Rizakis, prohibiting him from committing family violence.

More family violence notices followed, but the violence didn’t stop. Rizakis instead attended court and applied for an intervention order against Carol-Anne, accusing her of being violent and drunk.

Then Rizakis used financial pressure to force his wife to withdraw her statements to police.

During this time, Carol-Anne’s colleagues were growing suspicious of injuries on her body and reported concerns. Officers again attended the address, but Rizakis stood behind Carol-Anne at the door, whispering instructions to get rid of police.

‘Everything had to be done a certain way, things portrayed a certain way. This side of it really rips me apart.’

Carol-Anne

Child protection workers attended the next day, worried about the couple’s daughter. Rizakis convinced Carol-Anne their daughter would be taken away if she spoke out, and soon after she resigned from her job, worried about what he would do if her colleagues made another report to police.

When Carol-Anne became pregnant with her second child in 2016, Rizakis beat her so badly she thought she had lost the baby and was hospitalised with severe bleeding.

“Everything had to be done a certain way, things portrayed a certain way. This side of it really rips me apart,” she says.

“He kept me away from everybody and used to go out and provoke issues with the neighbours like them mowing the lawn or parking near his nature strip. Because of that, he told me not to talk to them.

“I would run outside and escape, and then I would say, ‘stop hitting me, stop punching me’, and he’d make it worse and smother my mouth when I’d talk and take me back inside.

“Then I couldn’t go near the windows, couldn’t yell. That’s when the suffocation, the tape over the mouth began.”

Eventually, a deadbolt lock was put on the front door and Carol-Anne was unable to leave the house without permission.

“It was a gradual progression of torture. In the end, you just have no respect for yourself.”

After close to a decade of abuse, Carole-Anne says there was something different about the day she found the courage to leave.

She struggles to put it into words but remembers Rizakis moving furniture around and being particularly antagonising. When she returned from the shopping centre with her youngest in a pram, she decided it was time to try to record his behaviour.

“He spotted my phone hidden in the kitchen and then he used that as the weapon this time. I remember seeing all the blood on the wall and my daughter’s face looking at all this happening,” she sobs.

“That was a really hard decision to run. There’d been so many times when I’d been in the hospital and I couldn’t make that step. For some reason that day … the bolts were off the door.

“Then I called the police to get the kids out.”

At the hospital, Carol-Anne recalls a police officer standing with her two kids in their arms, then handing back her children and telling her she had to end this now.

The officer suggested Carol-Anne write down what she needed to do on a piece of paper, one thing at a time.

“I thought, I know I’ve got no money, no home, but what do we need?” she recalls.

“So I made a list.”

Soon after, Detective Sergeant Elise Douglas and her team of specialist investigators from the family violence taskforce, including Senior Sergeant Brett Meadows and Sergeant David McCann, arrived in Carol-Anne’s life.

Douglas says it can take up to seven contacts with police for a victim-survivor to feel safe to leave a perpetrator.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui

Douglas recalls her team beginning the painstaking process of piecing together evidence of abuse they could use to prosecute Rizakis, even calling on the assistance of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine to work out which of Carol-Anne’s bones had been broken over the years.

In the end, they tracked down 45 witnesses.

“It’s a jigsaw and the only way you can put it together is by looking at the whole story,” Douglas says.

“Every time Carol-Anne changed employment, that was a moment in time we could capture. In this case, even a neighbour made notes about what he heard.”

In 2017, Rizakis was arrested for family violence, but it took years for his case to make its way through the justice system. In 2023, he pleaded guilty to offending that had taken place from 2010 to 2018.

It was the second major prosecution for the team who also successfully imprisoned “son of Satan” abuser Andrew Males in 2022.

The following year, between July and September, they arrested 42 family violence perpetrators and helped extradite another.

In Victoria, police are called to one family violence incident every six minutes, and arrest three alleged perpetrators every hour.

In the 2023-24 financial year, Victorian magistrates finalised more than 38,000 family violence intervention orders and 10,265 personal safety intervention orders.

Carol-Anne says Douglas and the family violence taskforce were pivotal in empowering her to seek justice.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui

Douglas says police must be open and curious and ask questions when investigating these cases and at that moment, believe what a victim is telling them.

She says on average, it takes at least seven contacts with police before a victim-survivor fully commits to leaving a perpetrator.

“These perpetrators need to present themselves that they are good … so when Carol-Anne speaks honestly, it’s at odds with what the community knows the family to be like,” Douglas says.

For a long time, Victoria Police and the community, the detective says, was wrongly automatically assigning accountability to the victim and always asking: “Why did she not leave, why did she stay?”

Douglas says: “That’s the most ignorant question anyone can ask in circumstances of family violence.

“Why do we not ask why did the perpetrator choose violence?”

Support is available from the National Sexual Assault, Domestic Family Violence Counselling Service at 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732).

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